Downturn Does Little to Slow Migration

Friday

While migrants have encountered resistance from the United States to South Africa, their numbers appear undiminished; one nation in particular, the Philippines, promotes its workers abroad.

MANILA — The world may be staggering through its worst economy in 70 years, but international migration, an ever-growing force, shows few signs of retreat.

Globally, the number of migrants appears undiminished, and last year they sent home more money than forecasters expected. Many migrants did lose jobs, but few decided to return home, even when others offered to pay.

In some places, demand for foreign labor grew.

From the Arizona Statehouse to Calabria, critics warn that porous borders hurt native workers, threaten local cultures and increase crime. But even a downturn of rare magnitude did less than expected to slow the flows, revealing instead the persistent forces that keep migrants venturing abroad.

Perhaps no place shows the lure of migration as much as the Philippines, a nation of nearly 100 million people, where a quarter of the labor force works overseas. Despite the world’s sagging economy, the country set records last year for the number of workers sent abroad and the sums they returned.

“We hardly felt it — the global financial crisis,” said Marianito D. Roque, the labor secretary, who has been promoting the virtues of Filipino workers from Alberta to Abu Dhabi.

On every corner of this jeepney-jammed capital, someone seems to be coming from or going to a job overseas. At the Magsaysay Training Center, beside Manila Bay, college graduates scrub replicas of cruise ship cabins, hoping for housekeeping jobs that can pay four times the local wage. A park across the street doubles as a sailors’ bazaar, a reminder that the Philippines supplies at least a fifth of the world’s seafarers.

In government seminars a mile away, throngs of outbound maids learn to greet future bosses in Arabic, Italian and Cantonese. Some cry through a film about a nanny who wins an overseas job but loses the love of her children.

Doctors go abroad to work as nurses. Teachers go to work as maids. Would-be migrants set off sparks at the Tesda Women’s Center, where the government offers free training to female welders.

One of them, Desiree Reyes, 29, spent three years assembling computers in Taiwan until the recession idled the factory. Back home, she heard that Australia needed welders and paid up to $2,500 a month, about 10 times her Manila wage.

“I want to go abroad again, and they’re saying that women welders have more opportunities,” she said.

Elsewhere on campus, women learn to fix cars, sew skirts and set banquet tables. Posters celebrate alumnae overseas. (“Marjury Briones is now working at the Pars Hotel in Bahrain as a flair bartender.”)

With soft features, Ms. Reyes looks more like a cosmetics clerk than an industrial trainee. But she likes the sight of molten metal and ignores the burn marks on her hands. “I don’t think of it as man’s work — it’s just work,” she said. “Life in the Philippines is tough.”

The financial crisis follows an age of growing mobility that has scattered migrant workers across the globe. Polish nannies raise Irish children and Indians build towers in Dubai. Of 15 million American jobs created in the decade before the bust, nearly 60 percent were filled by the foreign born, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To be sure, the crisis has hurt migrants, often disproportionately. A report by the Migration Policy Institute found that in the past three years, joblessness grew by 4.7 percentage points among native-born Americans, while rising 9.1 points among immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Anti-immigrant feeling in some places has swelled, at times to the point of violence. South African riots in 2008 killed dozens of African migrants, including many Zimbabweans. In Italy, attacks on African farm workers this year brought condemnation from the pope.

But with few exceptions, the hard times have not sent migrants home. Spain, Japan and the Czech Republic tried to pay foreign workers to go, but found few takers. Likewise, the number of Mexicans leaving the United States has not grown, said Jeffrey S. Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. While the economy and tightened borders have reduced new arrivals, he said, the total population of Mexican migrants remains unchanged.

Hania Zlotnik, director of the United Nations Population Division, said, “Worldwide, the crisis has slowed the growth of migration, but the number of migrants is still increasing.”

There are many reasons. Some “receiving” countries have escaped recession, especially in the Middle East. Some “sending” countries have been hit hard, giving migrants more reason to leave or stay away. Even in bad economies, migrants typically do work that others avoid, like picking crops or cleaning toilets.

And many migrants move for noneconomic reasons, to join spouses or parents. That helps explain why migration, once established, is hard to reverse.

Still, even scholars who have long studied these dynamics expected the battered global economy to have done more to deter migration. “It is the resiliency of international migration flows that again is most striking,” wrote two migration scholars, Stephen Castles of the University of Oxford and Mark J. Miller of the University of Delaware, in an April paper.

To grasp the tenacity of migrants, consider Fortz Portagana, 58, a Filipino who moved to Oman in 2006 to start a small shipping business. When the economy swooned, “I had it in my mind to go back — but what can I do back home?” he said.

He had exhausted his savings to go abroad, and returning empty-handed to his small farm would mean a loss of face. Instead, he borrowed from relatives with jobs in the Middle East, cut expenses and continued to send home $200 a month.

When business improved, he hired one son and found a job for another. A cycle that began with one migrant worker in Muscat ended with three. “This is a better place for them to make a living,” Mr. Portagana said.

Migrants from the developing world sent home $316 billion last year, according to the World Bank. That was 6 percent less than the previous year, but more than the bank predicted, and $80 billion more than migrants sent as recently as 2006. Since private investment fell much more, the relative importance of the migrants’ money grew.

While remittances to Mexico took an outsize hit (16 percent over two years), the Philippines offers a contrasting model of overseas work.

Mexicans are closely tied to one place (the United States), and one industry (construction). Filipinos work across the globe in dozens of occupations. Mexican migration is unmanaged and mostly illegal. Filipino workers are promoted by the state, and most go with contracts and visas.

Mr. Roque has spent his career selling Filipino labor, and as the economy slowed he stepped up his marketing. He won agreements with four Canadian provinces, which took thousands of temporary workers, including nurses, nannies, and coffee shop workers. In Saudi Arabia, a construction boom brought more jobs in the building trades. In 2008, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo made a plea to the emir of Qatar for more work visas.

Despite the downturn, annual deployments of workers rose by a third over the past two years, to 1.4 million. The sums they sent home rose 19 percent, to $19.4 billion, according to the World Bank. “People were projecting a doomsday scenario,” Mr. Roque said.

The Magsaysay Training Center in Manila feels less like a vocational school than a theme park of migrant trades, filled with replicas of foreign work sites.

Brynnerson Cepe, 25, beamed as he bustled about in a crisp gold uniform. He spent four years earning a college degree in hotel and restaurant management and three years as a Starbucks supervisor. But in the hierarchy of Philippine status and pay, the real upward movement would come from making a hotel bed overseas. “You can earn double or more,” he said. “And you can get other opportunities.”

The social costs of migration — abused workers, adultery, abandoned families — are widely recognized here, even as poverty persuades many people to leave.

Last month, the government brought home four planeloads of distressed workers from the Middle East. Some had lived for months in Philippine Embassies after running away from abusive bosses. They arrived to a scene of manufactured festivity.

A parade of maids wore matching T-shirts, donated by a corporate sponsor. President Arroyo, who calls migrants “heroes,” arrived to shake hands. A Filipino comic did a routine, leaving television cameras to capture the laughter of the dispossessed.

Ivy Lumagbas, 31, said she did not know whether to laugh or cry. She had gone to Dubai because her husband was jobless and her children hungry. The conditions were so bad — one meal a day, she said, and four hours of sleep — she barely lasted a month. But she was already saying that she might have to go back.

“When I see how many of us there are, I feel hopeless” about getting work at home, she said.

Then she joined in waving a Philippine flag and singing the national anthem, which celebrates the “chosen land” so many feel they must leave.

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